When Eliza Doolittle Studies 'enry 'iggins

A good deal of European, American, and Asian knowledge has been
produced in colonial situations; in any case it is unclear whether I or the people
I study are in the colonial role. The Asian, North American, and European
physicists-mostly men-I study are obviously in a position to resist the
attentions of this white woman. I "study up," to use Laura Nader's graphie
phrase.' We all know that physicists have more power-intellectually,
institutionally, financially, politically, and socially-than anthropologists and
historians; it does not much matter that some of us might not want their
power. The power dynamics that saturate everyone's research might be more
noticeable to those of us who seem to be on the bottom, where the epistemological and gender dynamics conventionally merge.